OKR examples,
explained by an OKR coach

This is a strong OKR overall, well crafted. We could wish for the objective to have a little more inspiration, or to more clearly give a why: why this is important, connected to strategy or business goals. It is often hard for engineering teams to identify real core outcomes and key results, but all of these are examples of just that.

What you see with engineering OKRs is that key results are often very hard to make understandable for the rest of the organisation. That makes it even more important to have an objective that clearly connects to business outcomes, or to how this actually helps the team, and is not framed as an internal matter like in this example. Overall, very strong.

This is a very strong OKR. Clear focus on a clear outcome, a clear change the team wants to achieve. The minor issue is key result two: raising organic visitors reaching a signup surface. I don't think anyone outside the team would really understand what that means. It is a little technical, but not complex enough to be a problem with the OKR. And on high-intent organic landing pages, hopefully the team already has a clear definition of which pages count. That is not something to invent as you start measuring. It is just for clarity, so you know what you set out to achieve and what actually matters.

Looking at the numbers, this is very ambitious for a team OKR, especially if it sits on a quarter. To move the needle this far you would need quite a few people on it, or a lot of SEO resources. You will also not make this kind of shift every quarter. This is a one-time real bump, so it sits a little on the too-ambitious side.

Overall strong, clear, and very ambitious, which is common with startups. Many times startups are exactly the kind of organisation that can really benefit from ambitious OKRs. With a lack of baselines, experts, and experience of what actually works, you can see results that double or triple the current level.

Number three is a fun one: reach 40% of users who would be very disappointed without the product. At the same time it needs some kind of measurability settled up front. Will this be measured at the end of the quarter with a survey to all customers, or is there a better metric for this satisfaction score?

This is a great OKR, and it really shows how a team that does not always have it easy to connect their work to strategy can still drive their own agenda and perform in a supporting role. That strength also points at the one issue: the objective is a little unclear on the why. Closing the books while the month is still warm spells out the what, but not why that matters.

There may also be some overambition in key result three for a quarter, or even a year. There might be good reasons for it though, a new tool or new software to lean on.

This is a strong HR OKR, with maybe a little bit of the feeling of trying to take on everything at once in the recruitment process. It is very ambitious: not only shorten time to hire, but at the same time improve the quality of hires through new-hire retention. All in all it is a little packed, but it is a great example of finding measurability in HR metrics so you can build key results from them.

Look at the third key result: that is the quality insurance on one and two. You can easily see that one and two alone could make HR a little sloppy, or lower the bar, just to hit the metrics. Number three then ensures that quality is not worse off because of the quicker process. An alternative might be something like recruiting-manager evaluation of the process or the final candidate, to make sure that metric does not budge. It would be okay to just hold it steady. It is a little too ambitious to try to bump retention up at the same time as you speed up the process.

This is an example of a problematic OKR, but also of what an OKR can look like for many teams starting out with the framework. In many cases it can be worthwhile to run a quarter with something like this, to learn and understand what the issues really are with this kind of OKR. Overall we are lacking on most parameters here. There is no why or inspiration in the objective, and the key results are not outcomes or results. These are pure tasks to complete, or ambitions without measurability, like grow social media followers.

An improved OKR would have an objective more like: penetrate our core market with increased brand awareness. Then a key result that actually measures brand awareness, maybe one that measures direct traffic to the website, and another that sets a target for how many large publications or search PRs should generate, for example.